Food and Nutrition in the News

Edible News

After watching several documentaries about our food supply and learning just how
deficient in nutrients the food we consume has become over the past 30-years, our
family has decided to make some serious changes. We are buying organic, eating in
season and buying locally. Our meat is grassfed, our bread in homebaked and I feel
good about what my family is eating.

Demand has mushroomed, as it were, over the past couple of decades. The Soil Association reckons that since 1993, the UK market for organic food has grown.

Supermarkets' organic produce is invariably more expensive than the conventionally-grown equivalent. And as you'd expect, when times are tough, people cut back. No surprise that the market has dipped since 2008.

If bees keep dying off at this rate, we are going to be facing a horrific agricultural crisis very rapidly in the United States. Last winter, 31 percent of all U.S. bee colonies were wiped out.

The year before that it was 21 percent. These colony losses are being described as "catastrophic" by those in the industry, and nobody is quite sure how to fix the problem. Some are blaming the bee deaths on pesticides, others are blaming parasites and others are blaming cell phones. But no matter what is causing these deaths, if it doesn't stop we will all soon notice the effects at the supermarket.

With the 2012 campaign in full swing, the president continues to get credit where credit is not due.

Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was an exercise in wish-fulfillment. The junior senator from Illinois who wowed Democrats at their convention in 2004 did not make a conventional run for the White House. As Virginia Postrel noted in Reason's November 2008 issue, "Barack Obama has not run as the typical candidate, selling specific policies, a worldview, experience, or executive competence. He has instead sold himself, a glamorous icon onto whom supporters project their hopes and dreams and, in many cases, their own identities." What many political observers referred to as charisma, Postrel identified as glamour. The last three years have supported her interpretation; a charismatic president can stir people to follow him, a glamorous one faces difficulty every time the spell is broken. Nevertheless, as we approach the 2012 election, some of Barack Obama's supporters continue to attribute political positions to him that he just doesn't hold. Here are four.

The growing trend of drinking and selling raw milk is getting one of its first major legal battles, with an Amish farmer possibly facing jail time for violating Wisconsin's dairy and food licensing laws by selling unpasteurized milk.

What questions are raised by his trial? Let's count 'em down. Vernon Hershberger, 41, is an Amish dairy farmer living in Loganville, Wisconsin, who has been selling raw milk to his 150-member food club. The food club was a tight-knit community - members had become so enchanted with the farming routine that they would volunteer their services, helping to care for the cows and package food. No big deal, right? In fact, Hershberger has been charged with four criminal misdemeanor counts in connection with alleged violations dating back to 2010.

Many nonorganic foods contain dangerous levels of GMOs and glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weedkiller Roundup. You won't find it anywhere on the ingredients list, but this potent herbicide is a new staple of the modern American diet....

"Farmers are spray increasing amounts of glyphosate on their genetically modified crops that are engineered to tolerate the herbicide. As a result, glyphosate is seeping into both animal feed and human food," Ken Roseboro, author of the GMO Report, recently told me.

Sunday, July 26, 2009, little Bailey Barzano, a 4-year-old girl was taken to the hospital after eating a Skittles candy.

Currently, no one is certain how the Oxycodone managed to get inside a bag of Skittles that appeared to be sealed shut. Additionally, no one is sure how Bailey managed to get the bag of candy in the first place.

How many ways can you use salt? According to the Salt Institute, about 14,000! The salt website has tons of handy tips for using salt around the house, and the best of the bunch - plus my additions - are listed below.

I can't think of another more versatile mineral. Salt is the most common and readily available nonmetallic mineral in the world. In fact, the supply of salt is inexhaustible. For thousands of years, salt (sodium chloride) has been used to preserve food and for cleaning, and people have continued to rely on it for all kinds of nifty tricks. So with its nontoxic friendliness and status as an endlessly abundant resource, let's swap out some toxic solutions for ample, innocuous, and inexpensive salt.

Certain proteins within our immune system hold the precise instructions needed to destroy cancerous tumors. In a healthy body, this inherent ability is always present and always effective without the use of drugs.

However, these proteins can be rendered ineffective if cells experience uncontrolled growth though damage or mutations to DNA or if toxins through food and chemical pollution override the immune system's natural function. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have finally helped identify and support previous evidence which demonstrated how foods suppresses tumor development during immune surveillance, the immune system's process of patrolling the body for cancer cells.

Launching a lawsuit against the very company that is responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes, 5 million farmers are now suing Monsanto for as much as 6.2 billion euros (around 7.7 billion US dollars).

The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the 'suicide belt', Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges. The farmers state that Monsanto has been unfairly gathering exorbitant profits each year on a global scale from "renewal" seed harvests, which are crops planted using seed from the previous year's harvest. The practice of using renewal seeds dates back to ancient times, but Monsanto seeks to collect massive royalties and put an end to the practice.